PHOTO CAPTION: Team Odicion leader Philippe Bautista makes his pitch before the Startup Weekend 4th edition panel of judges and other participants

“By being able to collaborate with all musicians around the world, we are able to create REAL WORLD MUSIC.”
This was the main purpose of Team Odicion, winners of Startup Weekend Manila 4th edition held at Mint College recently, besting 19 other participating teams. Bagging the 2nd and 3rd place respectively are Team Good Meal Hunting and Team Nawawala.Org.

Startup Weekend is a 54-hour hackathon and pitching competition where would-be technopreneurs are given a chance to pitch their business ideas, form teams to build prototypes and come up with viable businesses particularly in the field of digital applications. It was organized by Kickstart Ventures, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Globe Telecom, together with web engineering firms ProudCloud and Dynamic Objx, and innovative educator MINT College. It was in partnership with Globe Labs, BlackBerry, ADP Pharma Corporation, Pascual Pharma Corp, Payroll Hero, and the Bobbery.com.

“Shaping the future of music is a theme that frequently shows up at Startup Weekend, as it does in many casual conversations with music lovers everywhere. How music is created, distributed, marketed and consumed is changing. It has to change: to become more democratic, more collaborative, and to have long-term viability as an industry. A bunch of the Startup Weekend mentors converged on the Odicion team on Saturday night — testament to our shared belief in the space they’re in. We’re pleased that the Odicion team won, and we look forward to seeing them execute in market,” said Minette Navarrete, President of Kickstart.

Odicion is online music collaboration through multi-tracking and social networking. It is about connecting musicians all around the world and providing them with an intuitive platform they can collaborate on. The platform is the multi-tracker currently being developed by the team which will be easy to use for both experienced and inexperienced musicians. It was created to address the problems of musicians such as limited skills and network.

Team Odicion is composed of: Philippe Bautista, a composer for Film, TV, and other multimedia under the outfit MasterScore Music Productions; Mony Romana, a music business teacher; John “JT” Flameño , a musician and a graphic designer who takes care of most of the design needs; Yhanco Grey “Ygee” Esteban, the back-end developer; and Joanna Empit , one of the graphic designers and front-end developer.

“Granted that there are musicians who can play a lot of instruments, there are still musicians who have a limited number of skills. There are also some musicians who look for musicians so they can create something new and different. These are reasons for the practice of musicians of looking for others they can collaborate with. But no matter how big a musician’s network, there will always be limitations to that brought on by factors such as history and geographical area,” said Philippe Bautista, Team Leader of Team Odicion.

He added: “I myself experienced these limitations. I am a digital composer, which means I can create things all on my computer. But as I worked on project after project all by myself, the power of the computer at my fingertips, I found myself yearning for the human interaction that could only be found in music collaboration. And in spite of my own network of musicians, I still found myself looking for the new and the different.”

According to Bautista, the team that worked on Odicion during StartUp Weekend is staying together to push the project forward. This is a testament not only to the great mix of skills but also to the chemistry and bond that was developed during the weekend.

Team Odicion, Team Good Meal Hunting and Team Nawawala.Org are not the only ones who were recognized for their ideas. The judges gave honorable mentions to teams who pitched and caught their attention. The most promising pre-existing startup was Team Zipmatch.com, the team who gave the best pitch was FLOE and the People’s Choice Award was Greetlist. All winners received BlackBerry phones, an overnight stay at Venice Piazza, and gift packages from Pascual Pharma Corp.